Free Xenoform by Mr Mike Berry

a computer program, and not an actual brain. Debian’s avatars, modified versions of the black market’s best, were still pale imitations of Debian himself.
    Now , he told them and they bounded off through the router and away into the tunnels of the net, sniffing for their target like bloodhounds.
    Quickly, the avatars homed in on the Cyberlife Research and Development servers. They felt around the edges of the public access points for ways in. They set up a false account, implanting a sub-verter, which would act as a secret door.
    Debian flowed into the public server, aware of his body only as a diffuse cloud of electrons. Input from his avatars was experienced almost like physical sensory data, creating the impression of total immersion. His consciousness passed through the router, to a sat-sender, bounced off a satellite with sickening g-force, hit the sat-receiver, and passed unnoticed through the sub-verter into the public server of Cyberlife Research and Development. Security protocols sniffed at his data-trail as his avatars entered the system and apparently disappeared. One of them created a cover by beginning what seemed like a routine public enquiry into lab-time prices, justifying the original connection. The security bot was still suspicious at the disparity in bandwidth required for what otherwise looked like a regular, innocent query. The avatar, taking no risks, simply took the bot over, re-writing its records. The access log of the server would show a blip when next queried if Debian couldn’t find a way to change it once truly inside, but he would deal with that later.
    Debian spun within the system, probes shooting out like rockets, logging and copying everything and sending it back to his own data storage units, which isolated themselves from the net once full. Debian spawned another avatar, increasing the processor load on his computer by a few percentage points. It swirled around his body protectively. Information crackled around his head like a nimbus. He sucked it up, stealing it all, but it was still poor fare this side of the main defence layer. None of this was worth three hundred grand. Not yet.
    Debian sent the avatar into a server update program. It started to cross the bridge, which Debian hoped would take it from the public server into a machine which was at least linked to the company’s main computer system. If not, there were still other ways. Suddenly, the avatar was swarmed by interrogatory defence routines. It secreted away a part of the inter-server bandwidth and sent out bursts of data like carpet bombs, tying up all bandwidth available to the defence bots, rendering them unable to query the public server to determine the cause of the blockage. The avatar was inside the server on the far side before any of their pings were even returned. It sent back a confirmation that this was the right place and Debian’s main swarm joined it.
    Something big was drawing in, attracted by the frustration of the defence programs. Debian felt its approach like the vibration of an oncoming train through the rails. It was an avatar, employed illegally by Cyberlife. So Hex was right. Its suspicions were immediately confirmed as it examined the pipe from the public server. Angrily, it tore the blockage away and rushed back along it to the public side, away from Debian. On the public server, the overt avatar was dropping suspicious little hints as to its true identity now. Drawn by this, the enemy avatar rapidly began interrogating the public server bots. Debian’s avatar refused its pings and extended viral tendrils threateningly. The enemy avatar, apparently directed by the neural simulation of a particularly gung-ho Cyberlife employee, started to bombard its opponent with viral attacks. It attempted to close the pipe behind Debian’s taunting avatar, sealing it in the Cyberlife server, where it could be overrun, stripped down and interrogated. They could possibly even reverse engineer the neural